Pharmaceuticals

Overview

The pharmaceuticals industry continues to invest in capital projects at an increasing rate. Because time to market can be the biggest value driver for capital projects in pharmaceuticals, we partner with clients to help them execute projects faster and more efficiently. We help clients shift their focus from only reducing construction costs to also improving the total business case of a project and accelerating their product’s time to market. From large-capital-expenditure (capex) projects to small- and medium-capital portfolios, we bring project optimization expertise, proven techniques, and an independent perspective that helps clients identify improvements that will have the greatest impact on their business. We partner with organizations throughout all stages of the project life cycle, from design optimization to procurement through construction, commissioning-and-qualification (C&Q) handoff, and regulatory review.

Examples of our impact

We helped a global pharmaceutical client with more than €10 billion in revenue expand production to China. By administering a pressure test, we were able to reduce capex and identify opportunities to use lean design to increase operational efficiency, all without affecting the start date for production. The client saw an 18 percent decrease in the unit cost of its product.

We optimized the value of a biotech facility worth more than $1 billion. We identified $100 million in capex reduction and brought the project’s net-present-value potential to $130 million through implementing a two-phase approach. The first phase included a detailed design of the project organization and incorporated a robust risk-management process. The second phase included the establishment of a project management office and control tower, design optimization, and a review of the contracting strategy.

A leading player in the pharmaceuticals industry received positive results from its product trial and invested in a $1 billion greenfield project. Time to market is crucial for the client, so we worked with the project team to design and institute an execution strategy that would expedite it. Our approach rested on identifying project risks, determining who best owned those risks, and then defining a plan to ensure risk avoidance. We identified 15 high risks in areas from organization to governance, and created an execution plan to support successful project delivery.

A major pharmaceuticals company decided to make a $500 million investment in new buildings across multiple existing sites. Through an initial diagnostic, we identified the top project that offered an upside of $250 million to $750 million in incremental gross margin if it could be accelerated by one year. To capture the opportunity, we identified the project attributes required to realize the upside on that one project and reworked the scope to reflect those changes. We then established a step-by-step plan for the client to de-risk the project and complete it one year earlier.

SECTORS WE SERVE

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